Portland is popular in Tokyo right now. The Japanese capital boasts a brewpub called PDX Taproom and a Portland-themed coffeeshop that serves only Stumptown grinds, while an outpost of the Pacific Northwest hub’s quirky Voodoo Doughnut is said to be opening there soon too. So, with the notion of cosmic balance in mind, it seems only fitting that Portland duo Visible Cloaks owe much of their sound to the music of Japan.

Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile make no secret of their influences, having laid them out in a series of online mixes over the past seven years. The first was 2010’s Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo,made up of an array of Japanese electronic and ambient music from the 1980s. The set became something of a word-of-mouth sensation, and has picked up nearly 50,000 plays on SoundCloud—not bad for a spacey 65-minute soundscape full of chimes and vaporous synthesizers. Music Interiors and Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo, Vol. 2followed in 2013 and 2014, channeling hyperreal rainforest chirps and oddball synth pop; with last year’s Music Interiors Vol. 2: Interni Italiani, they picked up the thread in ’80s Italy, where Japanese exotica found itself mirrored in Mediterranean post-minimalism.

The mixes serve as a roadmap to their own productions, which emphasize a similar palette: gauzy digital synths, warbling wind instruments, wooden vibraphones. Yet as much as their inspirations may lie on the surface, something about the duo’s excellent new album Reassemblage resists scrutiny and always seems to be slipping out of view. That elusiveness is on purpose.

“Taking influence from another culture, there’s always going to be something lost in translation,” Doran says when we connect one morning earlier this month via Skype. “But that’s something I think is interesting and beautiful and should be embraced.” He’s seated next to his creative partner Ryan Carlile in a sunny office, framed by shelves full of books and plants; a monograph of the Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata sits conspicuously in the background.

The title of Visible Cloaks’ album comes from a 1983 film by the Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh Minh-Ha. Shot in Senegal, the film critiques the power dynamics behind ethnography while recognizing the untranslatability of experience. “I do not intend to speak about, just speak nearby,” the director says at the documentary’s outset. Doran and Carlile’s work functions similarly. “There’s this cognitive dissonance where you’re trying to explain something from another culture that isn’t expressible; it just doesn’t translate,” says Doran. In this way, Visible Cloaks’ music is more than mere homage; it is as alien as it is immersive, flickering unsteadily like a hologram on the fritz.

Japanese electronic music from the ’80s is enjoying a renaissance in the West right now, but Doran’s fascination with the subject predates YouTube. As a high school student who dabbled in sample-heavy breakbeats, he lucked into the opportunity to put out a 12" in Japan; within a few short years, he had put out four or five albums on Japanese labels, and even toured the country when he was in his early 20s. It was then that he came across B2 Unit, a groundbreaking 1980 album of synth-pop and proto-techno by Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto. “It was this lightbulb over my head,” Doran says. Here was an album that was decades old that still sounded not only contemporary, but ahead of its time. That album, in turn, opened him up to an entire world of artists who were virtually unknown in the West, including Mariah, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Yoshio Ojima, and Midori Takada.

Doran and Carlile met in Arcata, California, where Carlile ran an all-ages venue that Doran frequented as a high school student. The two musicians ended up moving to Portland at the same time, and they’ve been working together for the last eight years or so. Somewhat surprisingly, given the vivid studio sheen of their recordings, Visible Cloaks found their footing first as a live act, performing around town and heavily woodshedding their material for each gig.

Reassemblage’s wispy textures might initially resemble ambient music, particularly on tracks like “Mask,” where bell tones clatter tentatively around drifting chords. Listen closely, though, and an idiosyncratic structure begins to reveal itself—for instance, in the close-harmonized woodwind melodies of “Terrazzo,” or in the keening robot counterpoints of “Neume,” a duet for vocoder and Auto-Tune.

“You think of ambient music as static environments, looping indefinitely, that you can peek in and out of at will,” Doran says, “but we’re trying to have compositions that go through different movements, the way pop songs work, but using elements that are not obviously pop.”

The in-betweenness of Visible Cloaks’ music ultimately extends to its emotional register as well. At first, it might seem cool and distant, but the longer you listen, the more its expressive qualities come to the fore. Talking about the deeper effects of the duo’s music, Doran is momentarily at a loss for words. “Spiritual is more how I like to think about it,” he says. “It’s something you can’t see or even comprehend. The emotion comes from this other thing that’s behind everything else—behind experience, behind physical reality. It’s trying to describe something that isn’t visible.”

Pitchfork: Is there a difference between engaging with Japanese electronic music as a listener or a DJ and trying to adapt those sounds or techniques in your own music?

Spencer Doran: Oh yeah, of course. There’s no desire for us to recreate this music. We’re drawing from this music, but we want to develop our own take on what it is—take it as a starting point rather than an ending point. That can be hard. So many times, I’ll be working on a piece of music and I’ll realize I’m just subconsciously trying to recreate something I’ve heard. You just have to scrap it and start over.

[Yellow Magic Orchestra’s] Harumi Hosono had this concept he called “sightseeing music,” as if you were a tourist in these different cultures. He drew heavily on the music of Okinawa, but also African cultures. It was sort of a collage. In Japan, so much of their influence was European. In the late ’70s, there was this famous series of performances of Erik Satie’s more experimental work. It was a sensation in Tokyo youth culture. It’s like ping-pong—we’re looking to Japan, and Japan is looking to Europe, and Debussy and Satie were obsessed with Javanese gamelan music. Influence becomes so scattered and abstracted.

Were you surprised by how the Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo mixes took off online?

SD: Yeah. Originally it was just this mix I made for friends, and then I put it on Rootblog to promote a show we had coming up. So much of the resurgence of Japanese music outside of Japan has been through the help of Japanese record dealers and diggers who are really generous in sharing information, people like Dubby, who runs Organic Music, and Norio from Rare Groove. That music was really hard for a lot people to find information about. Back when I first did that mix, you couldn’t even Google many of those records. Sometimes when I was DJing, I’d play Mariah and people would ask if it was the Knife.

Were those records you had bought in Japan?

SD: Some I had bought in Japan, some were just from trading online. The Mariah copy I originally got, my friend found at a video store in Chinatown in New York City. He didn’t know what it was, he just thought, Oh, this looks like a cool cover. I think I traded him a stack of ethnographic records for it. When I was first getting into those records, no one cared, and you could find them for 10 bucks.

Is there a strong link between Visible Cloaks’ performances and what ends up on your records?

SD: Playing live is like a megamix. We try to keep a lot of our songs in the same key, so they can interlock in different ways. Listen closely to the record, and there are certain elements in some songs you’ll hear peeking into other songs, or one of the tracks is another track sped up 200 percent.

Ryan Carlile: We used to just practice a ton, perform live, and sometimes never play that material again.

SD: It’s all part of the same “sessions,” but the sessions are pretty open-ended, because it’s all home-recorded. This new record is material we’ve been sitting on for years, waiting to put it out in the right place, shape it into one cohesive statement.